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In today’s program, we will talk about copywriting. That´s, how to write to sell, or if you are already doing it, how to write to sell even more. So, we will explain how things work if you want to sell more. And remember, whether you are an employee, in a startup, or an entrepreneur, it doesn’t matter, you will be interested in what we are talking about now.
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And now, let’s get to today’s topic, which is about sales pages and how that page should be to closing deals. Many people might be listening to this and saying, “I already have my website with my photo, About Us section, contact form, etc.” Well, the first thing I have to tell you is that is not a sales page. It’s a standard website that should have several changes applied to it, as we’ll see later. Those of us from the old school still call it a sales letter when we refer to the sales page. This might sound strange to many because the term sales page, even if you’re not in the world of copywriting, gives you an idea of what it’s about. But when you say sales letter, it’s like you’ve gone back 80 years. Here we’ll call it a sales page so that everyone can understand it.
So, a standard website is the typical website with an About Us page, information about the services you can offer, information about you, sometimes written in a very technical way, which is a very serious mistake. Any kind of business, whether it’s a company that sells services, someone who sells education, someone who sells mentoring…whatever you offer, needs to have a page dedicated exclusively to offering that product or service, that and only that. The sales page is that page where people land and decide whether to hire you or not, whether to buy your course or not, whether to download your book or not. That’s the sales page, and it’s the most important page on the entire website. And I’ll go even further and say it’s so important that there are plenty of websites that don’t have it.
That is, they only have one page for people to call them or contact them. No, that’s a mistake if you want to sell. You need to have a page where people can buy from us, hire us, that’s the sales page. We can say that it’s the page where the sale of a product or service is made or intended to be generated. So, if I have several products or services, I’m going to have several sales pages, each one related to its product. In other words, each sales page serves to sell that product. If you have three types of services, four types of training, or five types of products, it’s normal for each one to have a good sales page that clearly explains the benefits of hiring or buying from you.
With that in mind, let’s see what our sales page needs to generate sales. The first thing it needs is a good headline. Mind you, like everything, rules can be broken, and there are pages that work without a headline, but that’s not common. Many times, when we’re going to write our sales page and we don’t have enough experience in copywriting, we think we have to give the most overstated promise possible to try to get attention, like saying, multiply your income by 10 or lose 10 kilos in 2 months. Many times we have this feeling that we have to give the most exaggerated promise to get attention, and that’s a very serious mistake. If someone reads a potentially good headline and a voice in their head can say, “you don’t even believe this,” that headline is bad. In other words, you have to make a headline and give it to someone who can be a potential customer, never your partner.
And this, although it may seem like I’m digressing, is very important. The sales page you write should never be read by your partner because your partner or your best friend is not typically the potential customer for what you are selling. A sales page can have three or four thousand words perfectly fine. The idea that people don’t read is a lie. People read a lot, but only what is directed at them and is interesting to them. In fact, sales pages that usually have more text convert better, but if you show it to someone who is not your ideal customer, the first thing they will do is say, “This is too long, nobody will read this.” Then you will believe them, and it’s a mistake. So don’t listen to your family, friends, or partner in this regard. Listen to them for other things, but not here because they likely won’t be your potential customer. They will love you, but trying to help you may actually harm you. Well, having made this aside, and as I mentioned, it’s very dangerous to be too exaggerated in the promise of the headline because people are getting to know us there, and if they say, “You don’t even believe it yourself,” then people become defensive, and everything that comes after is no longer credible. Therefore, it’s better to talk about a benefit that can be achieved gradually, not starting by saying, “You’ll have the body of Thor in three months!” As I said, this is a mistake that is repeated a lot, and no, it doesn’t work.
Now, another very important thing that a sales page must have. There’s a saying in the world of copywriting that says, if you get people to read the first 20 lines, they will read to the end. This is very true. If you manage to hook them in the first 20-30 lines, it’s very likely that they will read the entire letter.
To hook the reader with the first lines, you must leave an open circle and not close it, asking a question about something that may interest the potential customer. For example, imagine that you’re going to talk about mechanics, because you’re going to write a book about how someone can fix their car without having to go to the mechanic. And for someone who is interested in this topic, you would write something like, “On this page, I’m going to explain to you the two common mistakes people make when trying to change their car oil themselves. But before I do, let me tell you this other thing.” When you do that, you’ve opened a circle, like with TV show episodes. You’ve opened a circle but you haven’t closed it. Humans always seek to obtain the answer; we don’t like being left hanging. Therefore, these types of tricks hook the reader very well and invite them to read the sales page. It’s something beautiful, something exciting to be able to do that, to get people to read your work by using cinematic screenplay techniques.
Another great thing we can do at the beginning of a sales page is to state a flaw, a strong flaw. Let’s continue with the example of the mechanic. Imagine you have written a book about car mechanics, but you’re not a mechanic yourself. Instead of hiding it, and having someone point out that you don’t know anything about mechanics, you can just come out and say it at the beginning. For example, you can say, “Hey, the first thing you need to know is that I’m not a mechanic, but I’ve been passionate about cars since my father taught me how to assemble engines, and I’ve written this book. But if it’s a problem for you that I’m not a professional, I think it’s the first thing you should know.” This way, everything you say afterwards will have more credibility with your potential customer. In other words, if you can say something that might initially work against you, like writing a book about mechanics without being a mechanic, everything that comes after will work in your favor. So, with these little copywriting tricks, you can get people to read the first 20 or 30 lines. If you can do that with a sales page, believe me, you’ve already come a long way. And it’s just a matter of applying these types of techniques to whatever topic you’re writing about.
On the other hand, layout on a sales page is extremely important. Oxygenating the text, leaving spaces, centering some phrases, putting some words in red, etc. These kinds of things work really well. In fact, I have tested exactly the same text with different layouts and the results are also different. For example, putting the text in a block that people open and find all at once, and then the same text but well laid out with copywriting in mind. Well, the differences in conversions and interaction are huge. I insist that this is funny and curious for someone who is going to be listening to us. The same text, saying the same thing, selling exactly the same thing, can achieve a different result. Therefore, layout is key.
It is true that we also scan when we are not quite sure if we want to invest our time in reading something. So, you might go to the headlines at the beginning and see if this interests you or not. That’s why when you start with a sales page, if you can get the reader hooked in the first 20 or 30 pages, make them want to know what you’re offering, they might quickly scroll down to even see the price. But regardless, they’re going to go back up and want to know very well what you’re selling. There are people who not only read but enjoy reading about the problems you can solve for them. Copywriting is also the skill of knowing how to draw a visual image in people’s minds, that point where they want to be. Because one thing is proven, humans don’t see words when they read, we see images. It’s funny, we’re given a text, but we’re not seeing the words, there’s a sort of movie in our heads. That’s why I say people do read. We’re constantly reading, it’s just very difficult to spend our attention, that’s why the first 20 or 30 lines and headlines, line breaks, etc. are so important. It’s not that it’s important, it’s that you can write the best sales letter in the world, but if you don’t format it correctly to capture the customer’s attention, the result will be much worse.
Another vital concept for a sales page are bullets. When a sales page is good, there will be a point, after the headline and maybe a brief story, where bullet points will appear as standalone phrases. To better understand, let’s take an example from one of the best copywriters of all time, Gary Halbert, who was very skilled at this. Gary was selling a book for the real estate market, and one of the bullets was: how to take your house off the market and get it sold. That, for example, is a bullet. It means giving these micro-headlines throughout the page, which are like one incentive after another. There was a page inside the book that said: if your house has been on the market for a long time, what you have to do is take down the ad and put it back up after a few days, to generate new attention, so that people don’t see it as something old. That is, you take down the sale sign and put it up again a month later, with a new sign, different colors, etc. And you put the house back on the market. This resulted in a surge in sales for many real estate agents. This, without sounding exaggerated, is an art in itself, because if you are able to synthesize such benefits and curiosity into small phrases on your sales page, the results will be extraordinary. A good bullet has to capture a benefit in a few words, leaving them wanting to know more.
Another very quick example that can be done in ecommerce. In the United States, they do it better, but Europe or Latin America, most ecommerce write things like “Oven with 220°” or “Pool with 100 liters of capacity.” Those are just features, and they don’t differentiate us from any competition, nor do they make us desirable. So, what we can do is add a benefit to the features that the customer can visualize. For example, an oven with 220 degrees to make a dinner that will surprise your friends in less than 20 minutes. That’s the benefit. It’s about creating a little story, a little bullet point, where you take the feature of the oven and add a benefit that the user can easily visualize. “Cotton pants” is a feature. On the other hand, “Cotton pants to be able to have some beers on a terrace on a summer night and be much more comfortable and fresh” is making the customer visualize the benefit of that feature. This makes the same price, the same product, and the same type of person who reads it, take the action of buying it or not. That’s how important it is to know how to draw the benefit in people’s minds, and that’s what bullets do on a sales page.
So far, we have seen the things that a good sales page must have. But now, I will talk to you about what it should not have. The first thing it cannot have is a few words, little text. We need to tell the story of what we’re selling. In most pages around the world, there is little text and many icons, images, etc. They have icons and small generic phrases that don’t really say anything. It’s normal for someone who doesn’t know about copywriting to see these pretty layouts and use them, but I insist, these are pages that don’t convert even a tenth of what a good sales page that captivates you with a good story can convert. If you put an icon of a diamond, a drawing of a face and write phrases that are also generic characteristics, it’s much harder for that page to convert. And you can be an excellent professional, which is actually a very important thing, but it’s more important to seem good than to be good. Obviously, you have to be good, especially in the long run, but what I mean is that being good will not serve you anything if you don’t manage to make others perceive you that way. I say this because many times I have worked with professionals who are very good, but who have not known how to communicate it.
Most of the world’s sales pages have very little or irrelevant text. They believe that since people don’t read, there’s no point in writing anything. So, they put up text similar to other websites in their sector, four generic images, and call it a day. What happens next is that most of these websites don’t sell, or they don’t sell as much as they could. So, mistake number one, too many photos, too many icons, and too little text. This is the easiest way to have a page that converts only a fraction of what it could if we knew how to explain the benefits of what we sell well. And for that, we need words and the power of persuasion.
Further with this, it’s also fashionable to place an explanatory video at the beginning of your website, in which you introduce that copywriting in the video itself. I am more in favor of not using it, but if you’re someone who’s good at communicating through video, it can help you, but it’s the exception. When someone lands on your website, without knowing anything about you, and sees that there’s a video that’s more than 3 minutes long, it can turn them off. They might be with someone, they might be at work, etc. There are many factors that can work against you. So, it’s not that videos don’t work. They work in certain specific places and can work very well, but it’s not for everyone.
If you’re going to make a video, prepare it well because in a video, just like on a sales page, what you say in the first 15 seconds is going to determine whether the person wants to keep watching or not. I’ve seen videos that present themselves for up to a minute and a half, but that’s not what the customer is looking for. The customer doesn’t care about you, they want to know right away what benefits you offer. Once you communicate that, you can introduce yourself if you want. But the main thing is to tell them as soon as possible why they should watch the video. You’ll get much more retention and much more conversion.
And that concludes today’s program, which I hope has helped you learn something new. Thank you so much to those who listen to this podcast every day, and especially to those who subscribe to librenetworks.com, as you make all of this work and improve each day.
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Once again, thank you very much, and we’ll see you in the next program.